1.
Al Gore
Albert Arnold “Al”
Gore, Jr. (born March 31,
1948) served as the 45th Vice President of the United States
from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic
Party nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.
Gore is currently
an author, businessman, and environmental activist. He was previously an
elected official for 24 years, representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of
Representatives (1977-85), and later in the U.S. Senate (1985-93),
and finally becoming Vice President in 1993. In the 2000 presidential election, Gore
won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. However, he ultimately
lost the Electoral College, and the election, to Republican George W.
Bush when the U.S. Supreme Court settled the legal controversy over
the Florida
vote recount by ruling 5-4
in favor of Bush. It was the only time in history
that the Supreme Court may have determined the outcome of a presidential
election.
He is a founder
and current chair of the Alliance
for Climate Protection.
Gore has received
a number of awards including the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2007), a Grammy Award for
Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth, a Primetime Emmy Award for
Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the
subject of the Academy Award-winning (2007) documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. In 2007 he was named
a runner-up for Time’s 2007
Person of the Year.
An Inconvenient Truth
“The world we take
for granted may not be here for our children.”
Albert Gore
An Inconvenient
Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim
about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to
educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show
that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.
Since the film's
release, An Inconvenient Truth
has been credited for raising international public awareness of climate
change and reenergizing the environmental movement. The documentary
has also been included in science curricula in schools around the world.
Synopsis
Throughout the
movie, Gore discusses the scientific opinion on climate change, as well
as the present and future effects of global warming and stresses that
climate change "is really not a political issue, so much as a moral
one", describing the consequences he believes global climate change will
produce if the amount of human-generated greenhouse gases is not significantly
reduced in the very near future. Gore also presents Antarctic ice coring
data showing CO₂ levels higher now than in the past 650,000
years.
The film includes
segments intended to refute critics who say that global warming is
unproven or that warming will be insignificant. For example, Gore discusses the
possibility of the collapse of a major ice sheet in Greenland or
in West Antarctica, either of which
could raise global sea levels by approximately 20 feet (6 m), flooding coastal areas
and producing 100 million refugees. Melt water from Greenland, because of its
lower salinity, could then halt the currents that keep northern Europe warm and quickly trigger dramatic local cooling
there. It also contains various short animated projections of what could happen
to different animals more vulnerable to climate change.
The documentary
ends with Gore arguing that if appropriate actions are taken soon, the effects
of global warming can be successfully reversed by releasing less CO₂ and planting more vegetation to consume
existing CO₂. Gore calls upon his viewers to learn how they
can help him in these efforts. Gore concludes the film by saying:
"Each one of
us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change
that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can
make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions
are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We
have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political
will. But in America,
the will to act is a renewable resource."
He suggests to
viewers things at home they can do to combat climate change, including
"recycle", "speak up in your community", "try to buy a
hybrid vehicle" and "encourage everyone you know to watch this
movie."
Gore's book of
the same title was published concurrently with the theatrical release of
the documentary. The book contains additional information, scientific analysis,
and Gore's commentary on the issues presented in the documentary. A 2007 documentary
entitled An Update with Former Vice
President Al Gore features Gore discussing additional information that came
to light after the film was completed, such as Hurricane Katrina, coral
reef depletion, glacial earthquake activity on the Greenland
ice sheet, wildfires, and trapped methane gas release associated
with permafrost melting.
2. Read the fragment of the transcript to the film.
Speak on:
a) actual effects
of global warming that are causing great concern;
b) the two basic
factors that cause a collision between our civilization and the Earth;
c) the side
effects and potential hazards of the scientific and technological progress.
Effects of Global Warming
Europe has just had a year very similar to the one
we've had where they say nature has just been crazy, all kinds of unusual
catastrophes like a nature hike through the book of Revelations.
Flooding in Asia, Mumbai, India
this past July (2005): 37
inches of rain in 24 hours, by far the largest downpour
that any city in India
has ever received. A lot of flooding in China also. Global warming
paradoxically causes not only more flooding, but also more droughts.
This neighboring province right next door had a severe drought at the same time
these areas were flooded. One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact
that global warming not only increases precipitation worldwide, but it also relocates
the precipitation. Focus most of all on this part of Africa just on the edge of
the Sahara. Unbelievable tragedies have been
unfolding there and there are a lot reasons for it. Darfur and Niger
are among those tragedies. One of the factors that has been compounding this is
the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought. This is Lake
Chad, once one of the largest lakes in the world. It has dried
up over the last few decades to almost nothing. That has been complicating the
other problems that they also have. The second reason why this is a paradox:
Global warming creates more evaporation of the ocean that seeds the clouds, but
it also sucks moisture out of the soil. Soil evaporation increases dramatically
with higher temperatures. And that has consequences for us in the United States
as well.
Civilization and Earth
We are witnessing
a collision between our civilization and the Earth. There are two factors that
are causing this collision.
1.
Population - when the baby boom generation was
born after WW II the population had just crossed the 2 billion mark. I'm in my
50s and it's already gone to 6,5 billion. If I reach the demographic
expectation for the baby boomers, it will go over 9 billion. If it takes 10,000
generations to reach 2 billion and then, in one human lifetime, ours, it goes
from 2 billion to 9 billion, something profoundly different is going on right
now. We're putting more pressure on the Earth. Most of it's in the poorer nations
of the world. It puts pressure on food demand. It puts pressure on water
demand. It puts pressure on vulnerable natural resources, and this pressure is
one of the reasons we have seen such devastation of the forest, not only
tropical but elsewhere. It is a political issue. This is the border
between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
One set of policies here. Another set of policies here. Much of it comes not
only from cutting, but also burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 that goes up into
the atmosphere each year is from forest burning.
2.
The scientific and technological revolution is a
great blessing in that it has given us tremendous benefits in medicine and
communications. But this new power that we have also brings a responsibility to
think about its consequences. Here's a formula to think about. Old habits plus
old technology have predictable consequences. Old habits that are hard to
change plus new technology can have dramatically altered consequences. Warfare
with spears and bows and arrows and rifles and machine guns, that's one thing.
But then a new technology came: Atomic bomb blast. We have to think differently
about war because the new technologies so completely transformed the consequences
of that old habit that we can't just mindlessly continue the patterns of the
past. In the same way we have always exploited the Earth for sustenance. For
most of our existence we used relatively simple tools: the plow, the tractor.
But even tools like shovels are different now. A shovel used to be like this.
Shovels have gotten bigger and every year they get more powerful. Our ability
to have an effect on the surface of the Earth is utterly transformed. You can
say the same thing about irrigation which is a great thing, but when we divert
rivers without considering the consequences, sometimes the rivers never reach
the sea. There were two rivers in central Asia that were used by the former Soviet Union that were used for irrigating cotton fields
unwisely. The Aral Sea was fed by them used to
be the fourth largest inland sea in the world. When I went there I saw this
strange sight of an enormous fishing fleet resting in the sand. Making mistakes
in our dealings with nature can have bigger consequences now because our
technologies are often bigger than the human scale. When you put them all
together they made us a force of nature. This is also a political issue.
Three Misconceptions
1. Isn't there a disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is
real or not? Actually, not really. There was a massive study of every
scientific article written on global warming in the last ten years. They took a
big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that
disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming and
that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero. The misconception that there is
disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively
small number of people. One of their internal memos leaked and here is what it
said according to the press. Their objective is to reposition global warming as
a theory rather than fact. One of their memos leaked 4 years ago. They said,
"Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a
controversy in the public's mind." But have they succeeded? You'll
remember that there were 928 reviewed articles. Zero percent disagreed with the
consensus. There was another study of all the articles in the popular press.
Over the last fourteen years they listed a sample of 636. More than half of
them said, "Well, we are not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a
problem." So no wonder people are confused. Hey! What did you find out?
Working for whom? Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and
present the truth as they see it. "Why do you directly contradict yourself
in the testimony you're giving about this scientific question?"
"That last
paragraph in that section was not a paragraph which I wrote. That was added to
my testimony." "If they force you to change a scientific conclusion
it is a form of scientific fraud by them." "I've seen scientists who
were persecuted, ridiculed, deprived of jobs, income simply because the facts
they discovered led them to an inconvenient truth that they insisted on
telling." "He worked for the American Petroleum Institute and in
January of 2001 he was put by the president in charge of environmental policy.
He received a memo from the EPA* that
warned about global warming. He had no scientific training whatsoever, but he
took it upon himself to overrule the scientists. I want to know what this guy's
handwriting looks like. This is the memo from the EPA. These are his actual pen
strokes. He said, "No, you can't say this. This is just speculation."
This was embarrassing to the White House. So this fellow resigned a few days
later. The day after he resigned he went to work for Exxon-Mobil. You know more
than a hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this: "It's difficult to
get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not
understanding it."
2.
The second misconception: Do we have to choose between
the economy and the environment? This is a big one. A lot of people say we do.
I was trying to convince the first Bush administration to go to the Earth
Summit. They organized a big White House conference to say, "We're on top
of this." One of these viewgraphs caught my attention and I want to talk
about it for a minute. Here is the choice we have to make according to this
group. We have here a scale that balances two different things. On one side, we
have gold bars. Mmmmm. Don't they look good! I'd just like to have some of
those gold bars. On the other side of the scale we have. The Entire Planet!
Hmm? I think this is a false choice for two reasons. Number one, if we don't
have a planet. The other reason is that if we do the right thing, then we are
going to create a lot of wealth and we are going to create a lot of jobs,
because doing the right thing moves us forward. I've probably given this slide
show a thousand times. I've tried to identify all those things in people's
minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this. Whenever I feel like
I've identified an obstacle, I try to take it apart, roll it away, remove it,
and blow it up. I set myself a goal: communicate this real clearly. The only
way I know to do it is city by city, person by person, family by family. And I
have faith that pretty soon enough minds are changed that we cross a threshold.
Let me give you an example of the wrong way to balance the economy and the environment.
One part of this issue involves automobiles. Japan has mileage standards up
here. Europe plans to pass Japan.
Our allies in Australia and Canada
are leaving us behind. Here's where we are. There is a reason for it. They say
that we can't protect the environment too much without threatening the economy
and threatening the auto makers, because auto makers in China might come in and just steal
all our market. Well, here is where China's auto mileage standards are
now. We can't sell our cars in China
today because we don't meet China's
mileage standard. California has taken some
initiative to have higher mileage cars sold in California. The auto companies have sued California
to prevent this law from taking effect because as they point out, eleven years
from now this would mean California would have to have cars for sale that are
as efficient eleven years from now as China's are today: clearly too onerous a
provision to comply with. Is this helping our companies to succeed? Actually,
if you look at who's doing well in the world it's the companies that are
building more efficient cars. Our companies are in deep trouble.
3.
Final misconception: If we accept that this
problem is real, maybe it is just too big to do anything about. There are a lot
of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate
step of actually doing something about the problem. That's what I would like to
finish with: the fact that we already know everything we need to know to
effectively address this problem. We've got to do a lot of things, not just
one. Increasing end use efficiency we can remove global warming pollution that
would otherwise be put into the atmosphere.
·
More efficient electrical appliances
·
Higher mileage cars
·
Other transport efficiency
·
Renewable technology
They
all add up and pretty soon we are below our 1970 emission. We have everything
we need, save perhaps political will. In America, political will is a
renewable resource. We have the ability to do this. Each one of us is a cause
of global warming, but each of us can make choices to change that with the
things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make
choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in
our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.
Answer the
following questions
1.
Who creates obstacles in
people’s minds to understanding the problem of global warming?
2.
What case does Al Gore make against the choice between
the economy and the environment?
3.
What
actually needs to be done about the problem of global warming pollution?
4.
What choices can we make to bring our individual
carbon emissions to zero?
5.
What
indicates that the United States,
though not having ratified Kyoto,
is stepping up to taking the initiative?
6.
What historical facts does Al Gore refer to
prove that American people are capable of taking on global warming?
7.
Why do you think that throughout the film Al
Gore keeps emphasizing that fighting global warming is a moral issue?
8.
What aim did he pursue by writing books and
making the film?
*EPA – Environmental Protection
agency. A U.S. governmental organization that established rules and standards
for protecting the
environment e.g. against pollution. It was started in 1970.
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